Morgan Advanced Materials 2024 Annual Report

Today we released our Annual Report, which details the progress Morgan made during 2024.

The report details our financial and non-financial performance throughout the year, exploring what we achieved as a business.

"2024 has been a year of further progress for the Group in a difficult end-market environment. Our industrial end-markets, in particular Europe and China, weakened through the year and we saw a significant slowdown in semiconductor sales as customers for our graphite products addressed excess inventories, triggered by slower than expected growth in electric vehicles. Against this difficult trading backdrop, we nonetheless made good progress across the Group".

Ian Marchant
Non-exective Chair

2024 key figures:

• 8,600 employees
• 60 operating sites
• £1,100.7m revenue
• £128.4m Group adjusted operating profit*
• 25.5p Adjusted EPS^*
• 3% Decrease in absolute CO2 emissions (from scope 1 and scope 2)

*Definitions of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to the equivalent statutory measure can be found in the ‘Glossary’ and ‘Alternative performance measures’ section on pages 201 to 205 of the Annual Report.

Performance in 2024

Our first imperative is the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues, and I am pleased to report that during 2024 our safety performance continued to improve, reflecting the significant focus on employee safety and wellbeing. The lost-time accident (LTA) rate, the headline measure for health and safety, was 0.13 (2023: 0.19). Although we are pleased that the LTA rate reduced significantly this year, we are aware that there is more work to be done, particularly in relation to process safety to achieve a position of ‘zero harm’. 

It has been a challenging year with our end-markets weakening during the second half of the year, with declining and low order levels in European and Chinese industrial and metals markets, slowing in those same markets in the US and lower growth in semiconductors. Group revenue was 1.3% lower than in 2023 at reported rates and 3.7% higher on an organic constant-currency basis*. Adjusted operating profit margin* was below the bottom of our 12.5%-15% range, reflecting the sharp reduction in end-market demand, but we expect to be back in the range during 2025 as the restructuring and efficiency actions we are taking come through.

Outlook

Geopolitical uncertainty remains significant, as it has in recent years. Looking at our markets, we are expecting improvements in the USA reflecting the supportive policy environment in the near term. In our faster growing segments, we expect growth in healthcare, clean energy and clean transportation, while we expect semiconductors are likely to be broadly flat as our customers work through surplus inventory. In our core segments, aerospace and defence markets are expected to grow as are industrial markets in India. The outlook for European and Chinese industrial and metals markets is more difficult to judge and we are planning for only modest improvements in demand there.